Video: Batch rendering a turnable animation

One presentation render is great, but to really show off your work you'll want people to see it from all angles. A turntable is an effective way to get this done. We'll be using simple keyframe animation to turn the model around. I want the turntable animation to take place over 300 frames. The exact number isn't all that important, but 300 frames is about a good amount of time to make the turntable turnaround. So let's go down here and double- click and put 300 into this box. This changes the playback range to 300 frames.

Watch as author Ryan Kittleson introduces the skills digital artists need to create photorealistic 3D creatures for film, video, and game production. This course covers basic design, sculpting, texturing, posing, and lighting and demonstrates real-world workflow, starting with the basic sculpture in ZBrush and moving it into Maya for finishing, while editing textures in Photoshop.

Batch rendering a turnable animation

One presentation render is great, but to really show off your work you'll wantpeople to see it from all angles.A turntable is an effective way to get this done.We'll be using simple keyframe animation to turn the model around.I want the turntable animation to take place over 300 frames.The exact number isn't all that important, but 300 frames is about a good amountof time to make the turntable turnaround.So let's go down here and double- click and put 300 into this box.This changes the playback range to 300 frames.

So right now we're on the very first frame, which is good, and let's click on the ground.Everything is parented to the ground, so all we need to do is rotate the groundand everything else will rotate along with it.Now let's go to the Channel box, so we can see the translation options.Now we want to rotate this in the Y- axis, so I'm going to hold down the rightmouse button and go up to Key Selected.Notice that this turns red that means that there is currently a keyframe on thisframe and over here there's a red tick, which means that there's a keyframe hereas well, and we just need to go to the last frame and we need to change therotation value to 360 degree.

Now I want to put a keyframe here as well, so hold down the right mouse buttonon Rotate Y and go up to Key Selected.All right, let's deselect the ground and see if this worked, go ahead and hit Play here.Looks good, let's just bring this back to the first frame.There are a few more things to setup.Let's go to the Viewport menu and go down to Camera Settings and clickResolution Gate, Camera Settings and Resolution Gate.

This helps you to see exactly what will be rendered.Now let's scrub through the animation.This helps you to make sure that during the turntable, everything stays in framefor the whole cycle.Now it looks like right about here the tip of the tail just touches the top ofthat, and that's kind of awkward, so I want to zoom the camera out just a littlebit so that that doesn't happen.All right, that's looking better.Now notice when you click Play, it goes kind of fast.

That's because it's not playing back in real-time.So I'm actually going to right-click on the Play button, go to Playback Speedand go to Real-time, now let's see what happens.Okay that's a much more natural speed.We're going to be rendering out a sequence of images for the animation witheach frame in a separate numbered file, so let's go to our Render Settings to set that up.In the Common tab, let's give the renders a name.

So under File Output, I'm just going to click in this box and call it turntable.It could be called anything really.And the Image format, I want to change this to PNG, I like PNG because it haslossless compression and it also gives you transparency.Now let's click on Frame/Animation extension.This is basically where you can pick from a series of options that combinesthe name with the frame number, and it really doesn't matter exactly which one you choose here.

I kind of like this one because you get the name, which will be turntable, thenunderscore and then the number of the frame.It's just easy to keep track of this way.And then I like to change Frame padding to three.Now watch what happens up here when I change Frame padding.This makes it so the frames will be in order, if you look at them in yourWindows Explorer or in your Mac Finder.Okay, further down let's look at Frame Range.We want to render the entire turntable, so we want to start at frame 1, which isgood, and let's end at frame 299.

Now we're not going to render all the way to 300, because after the 360 degree ofrotation, the last frame is the same as the first.Okay, all the other settings should be good.I just want to look at one other thing.Up here at the path, this is where the renders are going to be placed.You want to keep note of where this folder is, so that you can go find yourrenders when they're done.This path will probably look different on your computer than it will on mine;unless your name is also Ryan Kittleson, then it might be the same.

We're ready to close out of Render Settings.We need to switch from the Polygon menu set to the Rendering menu set, and let'sgo up to Render menu and go down to Batch Render.Now notice down here it says that it's rendering with mental ray.Batch Renders actually start a separate program that runs in the background torender the sequence.If you want it at this point, you can even shut down Maya, while mental rayrenders to save memory.As it renders, you'll get a status update of the progress of each frame, youcould also go look in the folder where it is saving the images in order to makesure that everything looks good.

If there was a problem, you could cancel the Batch Render by going up to theRender menu and clicking Cancel Batch Render, then you can fix whatever theproblem was and try again.Depending on how faster your computer is rendering all these frames could take afew hours to a few days.I usually start Batch Renders at the end of the day before I go to bed.Nothing like waking up to the smell of fresh renders in the morning.In the next movie we'll be picking it up with all the renders ready towork within Photoshop.Turntable animations are a great way to present your work.

The 360 degree view, lets people see exactly what you've been working on.It is good to show turntables to clients, coworkers, and supervisors;so that they can all bask in the glory of your hard work or terror toshreds, one of the two.

There are currently no FAQs about Digital Creature Creation in ZBrush, Photoshop, and Maya.

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